This coming Saturday, the 16th, I’ll be running an ALTC game that’s not like the others. For this game, I’ll be running a full rehearsal of what I’ll be doing for the City of Auburn 4th of July Festival.
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working toward this for a while, in my copious spare time (har!). I made barriers for the players to hide behind, I got a cool banner to promote my club during games to passersby. Right now, I’m finishing up a second set of tagger racks that are specifically designed to hold the Drone (IRT-2x) taggers. They are smaller, pistol taggers. Small numbers of them work well in my other racks that can hold all three of the LTTO tagger types, but if there are 24 Drones (as there will be for these games), the other racks get a little cramped where the Drones can be. These are designed only for the Drones, so there’s plenty of room between each one.
The racks are 6 feet long, and each rack holds 8 Drones. The racks will all have spots labeled with numbers on both sides, so that the players know where to place their taggers at the end of the game, and know what each player on the other teams’ numbers are, in case they want to view VS data and know who they tagged, or who tagged them. I’m not sure how often that will be used, but at least it will help the kids know to spread them out a little rather than just group them together when they’re done.
Unfortunately, the rails I got to build these racks were not the same as the rails I got for my other racks. The key difference is that these don’t have any extra rail past the last screw hole. The screw holes are used to attach dowels that span the two rails. In the previous system, this little extra bit of rail would go through one of the links in the chain that holds the racks. Since this extension is not present for these racks, I had to come up with a new way to attach the rails to the chains. Fortunately, with a little thought, I realized I could drill a hole into the side of the rail itself, and hook a carabiner clip, the same kind I’ve been using to hang the chains on the canopy, right through the rail, and one of the links in the chain. In fact, I think I’ll be using this technique with my other racks, as the zip ties I had been using were tedius and could still come out, or get zipped together by a kid with idle hands.
In an interesting twist, after having made one of the three new racks, I noticed that the remaining 4 rails I had weren’t all the same. I had two more of the kind I had just used, and two of a kind more like the old rails on my other racks. Great. :-\ Now I have a third rack type.
I have one remaining challenge, though. I need to figure out a way to attach the new racks in a U shape like I did my old ones. I got some aluminum U channel, which might work, but it will take some experimenting. I might end up not attaching them to each other, but hanging them all individually like I used to. We shall see.
Anyway, I shall report the results of the rehearsal on the 16th, hopefully with some images, if not here then in my Lazer Tag Gallery.